Well how did "Captain" from BeyondATC put it, throwing some shade:

"While our competitors were busy sending birthdaycakes to themselves we were busy counting the money"

13 minutes ago, Farlis said:

Well how did "Captain" from BeyondATC put it, throwing some shade:

"While our competitors were busy sending birthdaycakes to themselves we were busy counting the money"

I wish they would have looked at their bug tracker and maybe fixed a few things instead, like vectoring.

EDIT: Oh man it's been a year and it still doesn't support shortened callsigns.

Edited October 12, 2025Oct 12 by Georgleboui

I have and use it on every flight after I got fed up of BATC ruining every approach with nonsense vectors. I don’t mind supporting SI as they are innovating and keeping the genre at the front of technology, which is something that those of us who lived through the dark days of FSX being on life support for a decade will always welcome. 

I agree that it has become somewhat bloated, although the copilot checklist feature is quite welcome, when it works at least. Traffic is still a bit of a mess but no program has cracked that properly yet. For me the actual vectoring part seems to work pretty well most of the time. 

The only thing that BATC IMHO does better is more consistent and realistic voices (if you have premium at least).

SI seems to mix accurate voices with entirely inaccurate ones such as USA voices sprinkled all over the planet, Indians controlling in Greece and the same controller changing accents within the same conversation. The AI model also has a brain malfunction at times and the ends of sentences just end up in gibberish, which is more amusing than annoying but anyhow.
 

One other plus point I’d add is that their support - for top tier subscribers at least - is incredibly fast and helpful. 

ATC with no traffic is a complete waste of time for me.

May as well put red light in the middle of the desert.

My biggest grip with SayI after 4 flights is the lack of actual traffic.

I see no traffic while cruising and have yet to see plane on approach. And this is at KLGA.

The map also leaves a lot to be desired.

I have 2 weeks left to decide.

Unless I am doing something wrong but I don't think so.

 

I love the SI pushback and checklist features.  They work almost flawlessly.  The problem is those features aren’t worth anything near the subscription price, because the ATC features are in large part unusable.

For example, I have yet to get SI to provide vectors on departure for airports where that is standard procedure, like KIAD.  Also, the tower rarely hands me over to departure. I almost always have to ask, *long* after such handover should have been provided.  I could take off westbound out of KLAX and fly to Japan and the tower controller would never let go of me.   I’m pretty much at the point where I just use ATC for background chatter and ignore it otherwise.  Ground works in the sense it gives proper routing, but I usually have to taxi “through” a few other aircraft it puts on the taxiway unavoidably in front of me.  Pre-departure clearances work well, which is nice, including CPDLC.  So it’s really hit and miss.  If they ever figure out vectoring it would be worth the cost.  Unfortunately I have seen no progress on that over the last year.  At times it feels like it’s getting worse, not better.

The problem is they are charging a premium price for an ATC product that is no where near being usable for its core feature.  I can’t help but feel that all the product bloat is really an attempt to distract users from the fact that the ATC is proving to be far more difficult than they imagined, and thus they can’t really deliver on the original promise.  

This is my experience.  I’m sure other’s experiences and perception are different.  I imagine it all depends on the type of flying you are doing and what your expectations are for it in comparison to real world ATC.  Maybe someone flying VFR out of small airports is happy with it.  Flying transport category aircraft out of major airports just isn’t viable.

On 10/10/2025 at 9:27 AM, JYW said:

It is strange to me that Brian seems a very intelligent, innovative guy, yet so many cutomers are saying the same thing.... "I don't want mentors, I don't want a tour guide, I don't want 'two tone murphy' in my cockpit.....  I want robust ATC".

Why is he not listening?       It's like self-indulgence.  "Because I can do this, I'm going to".

As a user of SI since day 1, I do value it and use it on every flight.   but I hate how it's descended into 'celebrity' culture, with these "[funny]" (as they are marked in SI) voice packs.   I'm not flight simming to have some minor YouTube ego trying to be funny in my ear.

I've also noticed some other disappointing changes too;   some silly voices for example. In the UK, if you ask for IFR clearance, you now get a grumpy, aggressive ATC say "OK... GIVE ME MINUTE!", every single time.   It feels very gamey.

Yesterday I was flying in the US and 4 controllers in a row said "Hi Pilot" when I contacted them.   Have you ever heard an ATC say "Hi Pilot" ??   Why does he add silly, unrealistics gimmicks to a product whose core offering is realism? 

I've been a big supporter of SI but admit, I'm feeling disillusioned at the moment.  

All the mentors, tour guides and 'funny' stuff should have stayed with the Entourage product, and should not be integrated into SI Premium.

I couldn’t agree more.  I had to quit flying out of KJFK because the goofy controller was an embarrassment.  I don’t want “personalities” to entertain me.  I want a serious ATC product.   I’d love to have usable vectoring, but I am losing hope, because there has been no improvement IMHO since the beginning.  This other stuff is just SI trying to throw a bone to users to distract them from the fact that the ATC is apparently much harder than they anticipated.

I can’t agree more with the previous feedback. I’m so frustrated that core ATC features hasn’t much improve when several of entertainment features are adding on top to attract more customers. My SayIntentions user ID is 40 which illustrates how I tried as a user to support the initiative.

I have the feeling to have spend the same time on their Discord managing tickets than simflying with SI.

It doesn’t’ worth the price. It looks like a expensive Beta-for-ever product. A promise you pay for.
 

2 hours ago, kholt said:

I can’t help but feel that all the product bloat is really an attempt to distract users from the fact that the ATC is proving to be far more difficult than they imagined, and thus they can’t really deliver on the original promise.

Or, more charitably, maybe it's just easier and hence more satisfying for the developers to work on these additional features rather than improve the core ATC experience.

I suspect the root cause for the ATC deficiencies that people describe here is that an LLM isn't trained to do complex spatial reasoning of the kind that's required to vector and separate traffic. The only way to get this to work reliably, IMO, is to write code to do the spatial reasoning outside of the LLM, then feed the results to the LLM as part of the prompt. I have no idea whether SI is doing this already, but in any case, it would be an approach that's much closer to what BATC is doing: You're writing your own code to handle the logic of how to do vectoring and separation rather than leaning on the LLM for this. As I say, I think this is the right way to do things, but it requires a lot of effort to build and tweak.

For those of you old enough to have used Radar Contact v4 what are your impressions of SI compared to that program now 20 years old?

I’m sure it does some things that weren’t available in RC but generally is SI an improvement?

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

For those of you old enough to have used Radar Contact v4 what are your impressions of SI compared to that program now 20 years old?

I’m sure it does some things that weren’t available in RC but generally is SI an improvement?

Hi Ray,

I used RC for years back in the FSX/P3D days and, for its time, John did an amazing job. There are a couple of things I find with BATC, FSHud and to a lesser extend SayIntentions that are improved over RC.

- Flexibility. I sometimes found RC to be restrictive in how it controlled you. Things like changing approaches, runways etc.

- Voices. The current crop are far better. Not surprising given the time that has elapsed and the way this area of IT has evolved.

- AI Traffic. Obviously this isn't something that RC did, so no real comparison.

- The UI. The little green box within FSX that RC ran in has been upgraded to a proper interface 🙂

In comparison to RC, I find BATC and FSHud are superior in terms of actual ATC and I would highly recommend you trying then if you haven't already. SayIntentions on the other hand can probably learn a thing or two about ATC control from RC :). That said, there are some things that SI does that RC could never do - Like you can talk to it and query what the QNH is at your current diversion location (for one example).

 

I know you love RC, but I'd encourage you to try FSHud or BATC if you were interested. 

Edited October 13, 2025Oct 13 by KL Oo

Hi Kael,

Thanks for that. No current plans to get MSFS having invested so heavily in P3D. But after 20 years I was curious about how far ATC had come in flight sim.

RC did provide options to change departure and arrival runways. It was in the menu.

I'm sure voices have improved significantly with modern Ai technology. RC was just wav files strung together.

I run RC on a separate computer and ShowText displays the RC menu. Far better than that grotty green menu!

One thing I didn't mention. Does it give you realistic approach instructions once 40nm or so from the destination? 30 degree intercept heading to an ILS approach?

And does phraseology match the area you're flying in? FAA for the US, ICAO for everywhere else? There are some significant differences.

57 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

For those of you old enough to have used Radar Contact v4 what are your impressions of SI compared to that program now 20 years old?

I’m sure it does some things that weren’t available in RC but generally is SI an improvement?

I used RC back in FS9 and remember it well. Certainly in terms of immersion, SI is way ahead of where RC was back in the day and having accents matched to ATC centres and airlines is particularly satisfying. RC also needed lot more setting up, as did PFE back in the day. SI, much like BATC is pretty much plug and play in that it picks up your flight plan from Simbrief and assigns you the runway and SID that you've filed.

It didn't always do that, so more than once I set up a departure and was then given a clearance for a different runway and departure which is quite inconvenient but I guess more accurate to real life. There is now a checkbox to sync SI with your simbrief planned route which cuts down on the guesswork.

Similarly the arrival runway was also a bit of a guessing game but now SI gives you the expected arrival STAR and runway (down to the specific approach - ILSX/Y/RNAV/Visual etc) once you reach TOC. Handling of approaches generally works out pretty well - it chops excessive track miles off long STARS (something that BATC couldn't do last time I looked, meaning some of those 100 mile German airport STARS were longer than the cruise portion) and the vectoring is usually sensible.

It does have some quirks - if you fly a relatively short flight that doesn't go very high then handovers come late or not at all. For example I did Dublin to Jersey and it kept me with Dublin Approach all the way across Wales and the West of England, before handing me off to Jersey for the final approach. That wouldn't happen. 

Other oddities include giving you a visual approach upon request - this is quite nice for airports that have procedural approaches where it's easier to fly say the first part of VOR or NDB approach that's coded into the FMC, think the Greek islands where you start at a VOR and then it's nice to do your own thing - but then it'll give you further vectors after it has cleared you to report final. In these situations I tend to ignore it. 

Overall as I said, SI is well worth the money for me and it's the only ATC Program out of pretty much all of them I've used since I started with FS98 that I use for every single flight. Last night I tried the new 777 sound pack and did a short 777F hop from Vienna to Leipzig. Getting the D-ATIS on the Comm page, then getting the clearance via CPDLC and having a nicely controlled flight all the way to Leipzig was fantastically satisfying, being given taxi instructions to specific points and following the taxi chart etc, all the way to being assigned a gate before landing so I can send GSX there in advance and plan my taxi route - all great stuff! 

50 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Hi Kael,

Thanks for that. No current plans to get MSFS having invested so heavily in P3D. But after 20 years I was curious about how far ATC had come in flight sim.

RC did provide options to change departure and arrival runways. It was in the menu.

I'm sure voices have improved significantly with modern Ai technology. RC was just wav files strung together.

I run RC on a separate computer and ShowText displays the RC menu. Far better than that grotty green menu!

One thing I didn't mention. Does it give you realistic approach instructions once 40nm or so from the destination? 30 degree intercept heading to an ILS approach?

And does phraseology match the area you're flying in? FAA for the US, ICAO for everywhere else? There are some significant differences.

1. FSHud works with MSFS 20/24 and with P3D (although I've never used P3D so I don't know how different is is on that sim) - there's no free trial, but it's on sale this month.
2. The FSHud application must run on the same machine as the sim, but the UI can be accessed via a browser, so could be any machine on your network.
3. It will typically give you a STAR and approach for you to follow shortly before TOD. You have the option of selecting different arrivals, approaches and runways as you prefer, including vectors if you wish.
4. There's no FAA vs ICAO terminology, which is a pity. It's more similar to ICAO, but could do with a bit of improvement for regional use.

As a long-time user of RC 2, 3 & 4 myself, there are one or two features currently missing (such as emergencies), but generally I think FSHud shapes up extremely well against RC.

Edited October 13, 2025Oct 13 by ConstVoid

@bennyboy75and @ConstVoid, thank you both for your feedback.

One question I didn’t ask was does your sim start you down before ToD where relevant such as when flying Airbus or Boeing? RC does so I initiate a 200fpm descent to keep it happy.

Does SI keep you at your cruise until the CDU indicates ToD? That was necessary in RC4 for the 40nm rule where you have to be at a required altitude / FL.

Ian, does SI know about different Transition Altitudes or does it treat the world as 18,000ft? If so, yuck! 🤮

6 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@bennyboy75and @ConstVoid, thank you both for your feedback.

One question I didn’t ask was does your sim start you down before ToD where relevant such as when flying Airbus or Boeing? RC does so I initiate a 200fpm descent to keep it happy.

Does SI keep you at your cruise until the CDU indicates ToD? That was necessary in RC4 for the 40nm rule where you have to be at a required altitude / FL.

Ian, does SI know about different Transition Altitudes or does it treat the world as 18,000ft? If so, yuck! 🤮

FSHud will tell you to expect a particular arrival and approach shortly before the calculated TOD, which I guess it does via a 3 to 1 rule or similar calculation. It then asks you to descend when ready to a cleared flight level, usually corresponding to the first altitude restriction in the STAR, so it's up to you if you delay the descent for a while or start down straight away. It's at this point you can select another arrival etc. once you are close to the beginning of the STAR it will clear you for the selected STAR and approach.

Transition altitudes vary throughout the world - I think it gets them from the navdata (Navigraph).